Anyone familiar with quality of foreign education Vs. quality of Indian education, be it arts, science, agriculture, or anything else, would agree that we are centuries behind. We need to shape up across-the-board, in every field. I think we should shed our arrogance that we are the best .... Japan is where it is because it did not hesitate to embrace what the world had to offer, the same for China, Singapore, Malaysia, etc.
The world is a place of migrations, of exchange.
Victor
From: "Rabinder Koul ravindrakkoul@gmail.com [Janshakti]" <Janshakti@yahoogroups.com>
To: Janshakti@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Rabinder Koul <RavindraKKoul@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2014 9:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Janshakti] Fw: [RajivMalhotraDiscussion] Return of the German Indologists?
The only portion of education that we should collaborate with foreign universities, should be on technical education, mathematical education. The liberal arts, philosophies, History etc should be kept under Indian control and India centric. Foreigners [play serious mischief, if it is left to them.Ravindra Koulअस्मद्रूपसमाविष्ठ: स्वात्मनात्मानिवारणेशिव: करोतु निजया नम: शक्त्या ततात्मने
On Jun 12, 2014, at 7:06 AM, Satish Oberoi oberoi50@yahoo.com [Janshakti] <Janshakti@yahoogroups.com> wrote:No one offers aid for free. We need to carefully examine all lucrative collaborations and offers to see what is there to lose in the long run.SatishOn Thursday, 12 June 2014, 13:00, "RajivMalhotra2007@gmail.com [RajivMalhotraDiscussion]" <RajivMalhotraDiscussion@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
The above mentioned initiative is carefully couched in terms of Germany helping India educate its people in science/vocations. Then comes the message at the end, "Opportunities to partner with Germany on their initiative to set up an International Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences werealso discussed".
Any western intrusion into humanities/social sciences amounts to further colonization into Western Universalism.
We suffer not only the fact that most Indian scholars in positions of influence in humanities/social sciences are seeped in WU and their careers depend on it, even worse is that we lack Hindu minded scholars of good quality and in large numbers. You dont want to replace the anti-Hindus with uninformed pro-Hindus - that always backfires and makes things worse. So its not an easy predicament.
In this situation comes an offer from various western countries to "help" us. This means more western theories and further erasing of dharmic siddhanta.
What we need instead is to push indigenous research and training in our own worldviews - how our traditions study society and humanities. Once we have created a critical mass inside India then we must export this worldview and our trained scholars. Thats what the purpose of places like Nalanda used to be long ago. It created a huge soft power advantage for India.
While we were the world's largest exporter of knowledge in the liberal arts once, we have now become one of the world's largest importers of higher education.
The German ambassador is trying to impress the Indian govt with carrots. How aware and well informed are our folks about the dangers of past German Indology from Max Mueller to Michael Witzel? BI has an overview of this past baggage in the early chapters.
While many of them distorted Indian sanskriti, others busily plagiarized and digested it. For example: Wilhelm von Humboldt learned a lot about Pannini from other Indologists, and then claimed to invent modern grammar. Wikipedia entry has not a single word on the Sanskrit influence and says the following about him:"He is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a collection of words and phrases paired with meanings. This idea is one of the foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of language. Chomsky frequently quotes Humboldt's description of language as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means", meaning that an infinite number of sentences can be created using a finite number of grammatical rules."
My job is not to do this activism now. I have enough research/writing in the pipeline to keep busy. The purpose of this group is to spread these ideas wider.
Regards,
Rajiv
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Posted by: Victor Cooper <victor99cooper@yahoo.com>
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